Area counties forgo tornado sirens for digital alternative

Cell phones blared with alerts as a series of tornado watches and warnings swept across the Triad Wednesday. But if you were hoping for an old-school siren warning, you were probably disappointed.

In much of the region, tornado warnings have gone the way of the phone booth. Forsyth County once had about 20 sirens but phased them out in the 1990s. Part of the problem was false activations. 

Randolph County doesn’t use them, says Christie McCorquodale, a major in the county’s emergency management division.

She says the county uses a system called Everbridge, which allows the National Weather Service to send alerts to cell phones, as it did during both the tornado watch and warning.

“I think the way that our world is today, everyone has a cell phone in their hand and most people are with social media, and we have a lot of people that share our posts on social media, so I feel like we're getting the word out.”

McCorquodale says Randolph County was relatively lucky. Dispatchers only had a handful of calls related to the weather, mostly about downed trees.

The National Weather Service had planned to conduct a tornado drill on Wednesday as part of weather preparedness week. The threat of actual severe weather pushed that test to Friday.